Oh bother!

Queue here if you have artist's block!

I think in jinxed myself! I shouldn't have posted about having a purple patch! As soon as I acknowledged it it departed! I'm blocked now with no inspiration on how to take things further. Maybe I need to take a trip somewhere!!!

Purple Patch

Have you ever heard of a Purple Patch? The wikidictionary defines it as this

"A period of excellent performance, where nearly everything seems to go right, work properly, and contrasting with a more general lower level of performance."

Now I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am experiencing a period where nearly everything goes right, my wouldnt everything going right just be wonderful!! But I do have to say i'm having a great time at the moment, I am on a bit of a roll. And it was completely serendipitous!

I've been drawing lots in the last week, many things similar to the stacked tea cups on the left. I think I will be branching out into greetings cards soon so watch this space!

Poppy Cat

I didn't show you this when I mentioned it just about everywhere else last week.

My cat Poppy is 19 and she needs an operation to take some of her teeth out. As she is so old and she is really quite skinny now I was very worried she wouldn't make it through the anesthetic. Not being able to do much to help this situation all I could think to do was make a badge in homage to her.

She went to the vet who did a blood test and it was discovered she has thyroid problems and so has to be on a pill everyday and the operation was delayed for a few weeks. My mum tells me she is very good at taking her tablet.

Hopefully she will be okay. I will be keeping my watch over her by wearing my badge and giving her more love and attention than she can handle!

Update: Poppy had her dental work today, she had 4 teeth out! But she is fine and home and enjoying food and drink as we speak! What a relief. Brave kitty!

A wonderful weekend away

Back to the world of the internet and lists of things to do after a wonderful break up in Southwold. It may only be an hour up the road from us but it's a world apart when it comes to everyday life! We stayed in a friend's mobile home for a few days which was really comfortable and much nicer than the tent we had last year at Latitude Festival!

Luckily we missed out on any rain that did make an appearance but there wasn't much! We walked up into Southwold for a look around and a drink in the Sole Bay Inn on Friday afternoon. We took lots of photos and perused the shops.

I had a lovely half pint of Aspalls outside the Sole Bay Inn and enjoyed the view across St James' Green to the sea.

We walked up to the Harbour Inn for dinner after much listening to the cricket on my Roberts Radio. Chris' fish and chips came to the table wrapped in paper like a takeaway, saved on the washing up I suppose! Back to the van in time to miss the rain and finish off the night listening to the radio.

Saturday we popped over to Walberswick on the ferry and had a spot of elevenses at the Parish Lantern. We were sharing our tea and cakes with lots of Sparrows eager to pinch our crumbs and help themselves to our left overs even when they were still on our plates! They were cheeping at us as if to say 'save some for us! we're hungry too!' Clever little things, they must hang out there all day getting easy pickings!
It was after that we discovered Fair Enough, featured in my previous post.

After that we headed up into Southwold to buy presents, have lunch and visit the pier. That wore us out! We bought lots of lovely gifts and a few bits and pieces for ourselves. Unfortunately Chris didn't get to see the water clock working again because it was running 30 minutes fast and had just gone past the hour.

The water clock on Southwold pier 'comes alive' on the hour and half past the hour when the water runs through the mechanism and the clock starts to work it's magic! I won't spoil the surprise incase you've never seen the Southwold Pier Clock but it's definitely worth seeing. As long as your luck is better than Chris'! It didn't work last time we went because it was so windy!

After lots of shopping we went back to the van and fell asleep listening to the cricket. We popped up to Mark's fish and chip shop for tea and then played Connect 4 and Scrabble. I was on good form, winning a lot at Connect 4 and managing to beat Chris at Scrabble for the first time ever. I think he was tired and wasn't reaching his full potential hehe!

After lots of game playing it was time for bed and then packing up and coming home. What a splendid time we had, very relaxing and we didn't really miss electricity. We had the radio for the cricket and radio 4 and each other. Perfect.

Fair Enough

Hi everyone! Back from our weekend away. I will post pictures and a blog about our weekend tomorrow but for now I wanted to post about this wonderful little shop we found in Walberswick.

Fair Enough is a small shop just behind The Bell Inn near the ferry. It sells lots of fairtrade and locally made things. Lots of wonderful lovely things.

They sell Sukie note books. Have you ever heard of Sukie? You should, go check them out. And the lovely lady who runs the shop, Amy, is super friendly! She also stocks lots of jewellery, bags and purses and card holders and spectacle cases made out of embroidered upholstery fabric by a company called Stinkie!! How good is that?! AND she sells Maison Bengal bags which are made from rice sacks, I really wanted one of those.

Those tea towels hanging over the edge of the shelves are printed by a local Suffolk lady called Fran Squires. They are delicious. There are also aprons and bags at Fair Enough too!

Amy herself makes rag crochet rugs which you can buy in the shop. You can see one in the picture on the left there.

As well as all that there are super lovely clothes and shoes made of old bicycle tyres too! I mean seriously this place is great! I can't remember everything that was there but the photos show lots of stuff so hopefully you'll get the idea. The shop is open til October in Walberswick. So if you're local make the most of it while you still have time! I'm so going back. Several times!

Off on a jolly!

Southwold for the weekend! Hopefully the weather will be a bit better than this gloomy picture from last August!!

Back Sunday night, no doubt with loads of pics.

i make fun stuff

Chris has just made a website dedicated to our craft fair project I Make Fun Stuff.

www.imakefunstuff.co.uk

We will be updating the site with any information or new developments with the project. I am currently waiting to hear back from a potential venue and then things will really start coming together.

So if you are interested in the fair, but not sure whether you want in or not yet because it really is at it's beginning stages keep checking the site, and maybe you'll feel more interested soon!

Rochester! A lovely city!

On Saturday I drove all the way down to Kent, I had never driven that far before and I had never been on the motoroway! I can't say I liked the M25 very much, but now I have done the journey I can go and visit Flo of Thoughts Of The Common Reader more often.

We arrived in Maidstone, had tea and flapjack and then decided to go over to Rochester which is really close to Maidstone. We parked up and the first thing I saw was a place called "Mrs Bumble's Tea Rooms". What a great first impression! We headed up the high street and stopped in front of an interesting looking shop. I had noticed what I think was a sewing box which was a stool as well. "We'll go in here it's looking good already" we thought! Little did we know what we were in for!

Field Staff Antiques. Oh my what a wonderous treasure trove! I asked permission to take a few photos so I could post about it and got chatting to the lovely lady behind the counter and a gentleman she was talking to. They even told us about the best places to stop for tea and cake!

We looked through old postcards, cabinet after cabinet of jewellery, vintage clothes, handbags, suitcases, crockery, glassware, tins, and look at those beautiful scarves all tied in bows up the staircase! It was wonderous. We were pressed for time unfortunately but if we had more I can guarantee I would've spent hours in there digging around through the vintage clothes and handbags and jewellery and tins. You can see me taking the photograph in the mirror on that last one! I didn't even realise. I will be braving the M25 many more times in the future!

Another week gone already!!

Blimey! It's been a week since my last post. I didn't intend for that to happen. I've had rather a busy week, apart from yesterday when I was feeling poorly and didn't do very much at all.

Monday I went to visit my friend Laura and her little girl Alice. I love going to see them, watching Alice grow up and learn to talk is just wonderful. Tuesday I had an eventful one trying to fix the electric windows in my car. I won't go on about it because that's not very interesting is it? Anyway they work now, they shut as well as open haha! I've also sewn and printed and drawn up new badges and visited LoveOne.

This is quite cool, they are putting my bags in the window and so I was asked to write a little 'about me' I decided to embroider it which would have been fine, it didn't take very long, but my grammar went awry in the middle and it doesn't make sense! Take Two on that one!

Chris and I have also been busy trying to get the craft fair off the ground. It is really going quite well now. We are still needing stallholders so please do get in touch if you are interested. We have a website coming together. We've had quite a good response from interested sellers and have made a link with the local borough council which is brilliant. So watch this space!!

And the picture above is of Southwold. I have posted it because we are going on a little holiday to Southwold next weekend and I am very excited.

Nice badges

Here are the newest additions to the CuppaTeaAndCake family! Nice Badges all packaged up and ready for sale.

You will find them for sale on CuppaTeaAndCake Etsy and CuppaTeaAndCake Folksy

Show your love for tea, knitting, cake and soon coffee everywhere!!

Craft Sellers Wanted

For several months now Chris and I have been thinking about putting on our own craft fair. As regular readers will know I have done a few fairs in the past few months and they have not been very successful! I have many ideas on why that is but the main one is that I think there are too many different types and styles of craft put together and that so far my 'style' hasn't fitted with everyone elses.

Luckily thanks to reading many blogs some of which based in my region (East Anglia) I know that all is not lost and there are people out there doing similar things with the same intentions. And there are similar fairs going on with lots of success!

So here is the first step of this process. We are looking for craft sellers who would be interested in having a stall at our planned fair. It will be in central Ipswich, and the stalls will be very reasonably priced as long as we get enough people. We want cool, fun, exciting, interesting, crafts and arts, we want to stand out from the usual craft fairs.

We are in the very early stages at the moment because we don't want to hire the venue and not get enough stall holders so we are just looking for people to register their interest with us so we can then say 'yes' to people and book the venue and give you a date and other info.

Please email imakefunstuff@googlemail.com to say 'Yes i'm interested!' thank you!